THE STATE OF THE UNION
By EDWARD MONTGOMERY
New York, January 7. 4011HE state of the Union," Mr. Truman announced to the new
Congress last Wednesday in his flat, unemphatic Missouri voice, "is good." And then he promptly went on to list no fewer than eleven major respects in which he found the state of the Union not so good—or, at least, leaving much room for improvement. Prices are too high, he said. Demand is still out-running production. Minimum wages are too low. Small business is losing out to monopoly. Farmers are still insecure and under-privileged. Natural resources are being squandered. There is a shortage of electric power. There is a shortage of housing. There is a shortage of health and medical facilities. Education is inadequate. " Our democratic ideals are often thwarted by prejudice and intolerance."
Thus Mr. Truman summarises what he feels is wrong with " the state of the Union " as he begins his first term of office as elected President. His remedies for the specific ills he mentions are as various as the ills themselves, but basically they are all founded upon the same general formula—a greater share of Federal Government responsibility for, and hence control over, all that appertains to the public welfare. It is a formula which has attracted a long line of distinguished Presidents, both Republican and Democrat, from Lincoln down through Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson to its latest, and greatest, exponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is a curious reflection on the vagaries of politics that during the Civil War period and for long thereafter it was the Republican Party which sought to strengthen the power of the Federal Government and to vindicate its authority to preserve the Union, while the Democrats carried their defence of " States' rights " and their opposition to expansion of Federal power to the point of secession and civil war. Now the boot is on the other foot ; it is the Democratic Party which is seeking to increase the Central Government's power and authority and is standing advocate of " statism " as the cure for all social ills.
However, twenty-three million Americans gave Mr.. Truman and the Democratic Party a mandate to carry on with that basic formula, and in his message to Congress he has fulfilled all his campaign promises. Now it is up to Congress. Much will depend on the mere physical capacity of the Congress to convert into law the tremendous programme the President has outlined. Much of it, of course, simply represents an expansion or extension of legislation already on the books. Some of it is non-controversial. On such matters as the extension of social security, of Federal assistance to housing, education, health and the conservation of natural resources, there will be little argument, except as to how they are to be paid for. There will be controversy, however, over Mr. Truman's sugges- tions for combating inflation and reducing prices, and for raising an additional $4 billion in Federal revenue by increasing corporate taxes, taxes on estates and gifts, and income taxes in the higher income groups. Perhaps the bitterest controversy of all will be aroused by his proposal to allow the Federal Government to intervene directly in the expansion of production of materials in short supply-- specifically, steeL The uproar over this has already begun in the headlines and the editorials of the newspapers, and it may well become for the Truman Administration a political issue as important and as bitterly fought as President Roosevelt's Supreme Court proposal of 1937, or as the more ambitious project of the Labour Government for the steel and iron industry in Britain. It is perhaps worth quoting in full just what Mr. Truman said about this. It was the eighth point in his programme of measures to combat inflation—a new and wholly unexpected addition to the familiar list of measures which he had already twice asked for from the previous• Congress.
" Eighth," said Mr. Truman, " to authorise an immediate study of the adequacy of production facilities for materials in critically short supply, such as steel ; and, if found necessary, to authorise Government loans for the expansion of production facilities to relieve such shortages, and furthermore to authorise the construction of such facilities directly if action by private industry fails to meet our needs." (Italics mine.) In the italicised portion of that sentence Mr. Truman comes closer to Socialism as it is understood by Marxian or Fabian Socialists than any American statesman has dared to go hitherto. If the Congress should grant him to the full the powers he asks for in that paragraph, Mr. Truman could put the Federal Government into direct competition with private industry in any field of production in which the Government decided private industry was failing, either wilfully or because of inadequate resources, to " meet our needs."
A good many commentators, both in America and abroad, have interpreted Mr. Truman's election as indicating a trend to the Left, in the European sense of that political designation—as general political turn by the American people towards those principles of Socialism, or Social Democracy, which are the common currency of so much of Europe's political thinking today. Public ownership of the means of production is perhaps the basic tenet of all Socialist theory, whether Marxist or Fabian or any other variant. In the paragraph quoted above Mr. Truman has taken, the first admittedly tentative step in the direction of true Socialism as it is commonly understood by Socialists. In doing so he has provided an excellent test of the validity of the suggestion that America is swinging toward the " Left " and toward Socialism of the European variety. The public reaction to Mr. Truman's proposal should prove clearly just how far the American people are at present prepared to accept Socialist theory as a guide to America's political and economic future.
But for the world at large perhaps the most significant feature of the President's message to Congress, and its most encouraging, was his decision to say so little about the " state of the Union " in its relations with the rest of the world. In a speech lasting just under half an hour he devoted little over three minutes to discussing foreign affairs and foreign policy. He was able to do this, not because America's international relations are unimportant to America, or because the American people are no longer interested in them, but because the American people have at last firmly made up their minds about them. The great debate which racked America politically, with varying degrees of intensity and bitterness for over a quarter of a century, from before World War I to the end of World War II, on the subject " Internationalism v. Isolationism," is over. Its last expiring echoes were heard in the Congressional arguments over the Marshall Plan last year. In his message to Congress Mr. Truman wrote " finis " to it when he said: " Our guiding star is the principle of international co-opera- tion. To this concept we have made a national commitment as profound as anything in history. To it we have pledged our resources and our honour."
If the importance of this needs any emphasis, it is only necessary to think what the condition of the world would be today if at the end of World War II the United States had chosen to retire jnto the same isolation, the same attitude of averseness to taking any share of responsibility for world peace and world reconstruction, into which it withdrew at the end of World War I. If it had, the developments of the past three years would have been very different.
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